His work on the German philosopher Frege has been acclaimed. His first book Frege: Philosophy of Language (1973), written over many years, is now regarded as a classic. The book was instrumental in the rediscovery of Frege's work, and influenced a generation of British philosophers.

In his 1963 paper "Realism"[9] he popularised a controversial approach to understanding the historical dispute between realist and other non-realist philosophy such as idealism, nominalism, Irrealism. He characterized all of the latter as anti-realist and argued that the fundamental disagreement between realist and anti-realist was over the nature of truth. For Dummett, realism is best understood as semantic realism, i. e., as the view accepting that every declarative sentence of one's language is bivalent (determinately true or false) and evidence-transcendent (independent of our means of coming to know which),[10][2] while anti-realism rejects this view in favour of a concept of knowable (or assertible) truth.[11] Historically, these debates had been understood as disagreements about whether a certain type of entity objectively exists or not. Thus we may speak of (anti-)realism with respect to other minds, the past, the future, universals, mathematical entities (such as natural numbers), moral categories, the material world, or even thought. The novelty of Dummett's approach consisted in seeing these disputes as, at base, analogous to the dispute between intuitionism and Platonism in the philosophy of mathematics.

Franzane Abella commented that Dummett was really interested not in understanding problems via classical logic but via intutionistic logic, and Abella stated that "such mathematical entities are more likely to be an ontological myth for Dummett... because truth cannot be unidentified via intuition, and of course it will fall on the notion of logical opaqueness, which statements are not likely to be understood easily in the first place."[12] Franzane Abella further added that "Dummett has an astounding influence when he brought forward the deep-order justificationist semantics; this influenced the theory of meaning and the classification of understanding via practices, whether the statement can be refuted or not based on its meaning." Abella summed up by saying that Dummett refuted the theory brought forward by realism about the cognisance of meaning. For example, the psychological change in our conceptions of meaning of any statements should be properly grasped, because if not, there exists an alteration and confusion of meaning, and of course a failure in grasping truth-values.

Dummett espoused semantic anti-realism, a position suggesting that truth cannot serve as the central notion in the theory of meaning and must be replaced by verifiability.[13] Semantic anti-realism is sometimes related to semantic inferentialism.[14]

Dummett was politically active, through his work as a campaigner against racism. He let his philosophical career stall in order to influence civil rights for minorities during what he saw as a crucial period of reform in the late 1960s. He also has worked on the theory of voting, which led to his introduction of the Quota Borda system.

Dummett drew heavily on his work in this area in writing his book On Immigration and Refugees, an account of what justice demands of states in relationship to movement between states. Dummett in that book argues that the vast majority of opposition to immigration has been founded in racism and says that this has especially been so in the UK.

He has written of his shock on finding anti-Semitic and fascist opinions in the diaries of Frege, to whose work he had devoted such a high proportion of his professional career.[15]

After the establishment of the Farquarson–Dummett conjecture by Gibbard and Sattherthwaite, Dummett contributed three proofs of the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem in his monograph on voting. He also wrote a shorter overview of the theory of voting for the educated public.

Dummett was also a scholar in the field of card games history, with numerous books and articles to his credit. He is a founding member of the International Playing-Card Society, in whose journal The Playing-Card he regularly published opinions, research and reviews of current literature on the subject; he is also a founder of the Accademia del Tarocchino Bolognese in Bologna. His historical work on the use of the tarot pack in card games — "(t)he fortune telling and occult part of it has never been my principal interest..."[19] — The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City, attempted to establish that the invention of Tarot could be set in 15th-century Italy. He laid the foundation for most of the subsequent research on the game of tarot, including exhaustive accounts of the rules of all hitherto known forms of the game.[citation needed]

His analysis of the historical evidence suggested that fortune-telling and occult interpretations were unknown prior to the 18th century. During most of their recorded history, he wrote, Tarot cards were used to play an extremely popular trick-taking game which is still enjoyed in much of Europe. Dummett showed that the middle of the 18th century saw a great development in the game of Tarot, including a modernized deck with French suit-signs, and without the medieval allegories that interest occultists, along with a growth in Tarot's popularity. "The hundred years between about 1730 and 1830 were the heyday of the game of Tarot; it was played not only in northern Italy, eastern France, Switzerland, Germany and Austro-Hungary, but also in Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and even Russia. Not only was it, in these areas, a famous game with many devotees: it was also, during that period, more truly an international game than it had ever been before or than it has ever been since...."[20]

In 1987, Dummett collaborated with Giordano Berti and Andrea Vitali to the project of the great Tarot exhibition at Castello Estense in Ferrara; in that occasion he wrote some texts for the catalog of the exhibition."[21]

In 1944, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, and remained a practising Catholic. Throughout his career, Dummett published a number of articles on various issues facing the contemporary Catholic Church, mainly in the English Dominican journal, New Blackfriars. Dummett published an essay in the bulletin of the Adoremus Society on the subject of liturgy, and a philosophical essay defending the intelligibility of the Catholic Church's teaching on the Eucharist.[22]

In October 1987, one of his contributions to New Blackfriars sparked controversy, when he seemingly attacked currents of Catholic theology which appeared to him to diverge from orthodox Catholicism and to "imply that, from the very earliest times, the Catholic Church, claiming to have a mission from God to safeguard divinely revealed truth, has taught and insisted on the acceptance of falsehoods." Dummett argued that "the divergence which now obtains between what the Catholic Church purports to believe and what large or important sections of it in fact believe ought, in my view, to be tolerated no longer: not if there is to be a rationale for belonging to that Church; not if there is to be any hope of reunion with the other half of Christendom; not if the Catholic Church is not to be a laughing-stock in the eyes of the world." A debate in the journal over these remarks continued for months, attracting contributions from the theologian Nicholas Lash and the historian Eamon Duffy, among others.[23]

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